DINNER WITH RUSSIAN’S MASTER CHEF 2014

agosto 5, 2014

I had the great joy to share my 2 months doing my intensive course in Le Cordon Bleu Paris with some great people. People with different backgrounds and styles, specially (now) my friend Rafael Kazumyan, the Master Chef 2014 champion of Russia.

Rafael is Armenian and currently leaving in Moscow where he is an independent chef involved with different activities and at the same time managing his own business Your Personal Chef .

When I ask him the cliché type of question about his cooking philosophy he answered : ‘My philosophy of cooking is simple – a combination of flavors, textures, colors and emotional perception of food’.

What we did during an afternoon at his place was to develop some straight forward recipes where Rafael want’s to share with us his ideas of dishes that you’ll be able to cook using these combinations and adapt them and be creative.

Let’s start with the basics.

Pan fried scallops with black chocolate.

For this, strongly heat a frying pan and fry in olive oil on both sides until golden brown very quickly. After add a bit of salt, but carefully, because scallops contain a lot of salt inside. After rub with dark chocolate (70% and above) and serve.

The next dish goes for the foie gras lovers: Strawberry glazed foie gras on a ginger-orange cookie

Here the main idea is not even the foie gras. The main thing is the combination of the taste of liver with berries and especially strawberries. You can make any liver pate or just fry scallop liver and feed it with strawberry sauce, jam or fresh.

And finally, a classic Italian dessert:

Tiramisu

Rafael is going to tell us how to cook this dessert in 5 minutes if you have a siphon or 10 if you (like me) don’t have one.

The first thing is to do the whip cream separately. Mascarpone mixed with sugar to taste and slowly introduce it with whipped cream. With siphon easier, you just mix until homogenous cream, mascarpone and powdered sugar and pour into the siphon. Dressed with balloons and biscuits or a glass of cream is deposited. I made ​​chocolate ground instead of the cookies, it gives you the taste and texture of chocolate chip cookies. All decorated with passion fruit caramel. But the main secret of Rafael’s tiramisu is not in technology. He tell us : ‘I add in cream black pepper. Or rather black pepper extract, but if not, you can simply add black pepper. And can be vanilla, it also goes well with black pepper’.

We finished our dinner with Rafel’s words: ‘don’t be afraid to experiment. The food is to give emotions to people! Salute!